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Kathleen Wynne starts her long march to road tolls: Cohn

Kathleen Wynne dropped by the board of trade Monday to break bread over traffic jams.

It was an unusual meeting of minds and shared appetites: Ontario’s left-leaning premier and Toronto’s right-leaning bastion of big business making common cause over gridlock.

They weren’t alone. Also in the friendly Bay St. crowd were some unusual suspects from the non-profit sector, advocacy groups, the academic sector and other progressive voices — coming together to break up roadblocks across the GTA and Hamilton.

The shared table talk was about indigestion over congestion. Lost time in traffic costs business money. Lack of speedy transit hurts the working poor.

Inside the room, everyone seemed onside. Outside, however, people are still offside.

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And that was the elephant in the room as Wynne walked in: 350 savvy, sometimes self-interested, sometimes civic-minded opinion leaders in the audience were more or less like-minded on gridlock — but are hardly a representative sample.

The other 6 million people in the GTHA will be a tougher crowd. How do you sell a tax increase, market a road toll, or persuade people to pay more out of their pockets?

As Wynne took the podium, she broached the question on everyone’s mind:

“People have been asking me, they have been saying to me: How are you going to do this if people disagree?

“Well first of all, I won’t be doing anything alone. I’m not doing anything by myself,” she explained.

The premier likes to say she’s not the smartest person in the room, that she wants input from experts and feedback from ordinary folks. But in the end, she will be alone.

No matter how many allies she recruits to her cause among the business and NGO elites, no matter how much cabinet solidarity and caucus unity she musters, leadership can be a lonely business.

Any pollster or politician will tell you that asking voters to pony up can be political death. While frustration over traffic jams has left people more open to road tolls and other transportation taxes, they are still deeply skeptical.

If that’s where the debate begins and ends — politics by polling — then we might as well give up on gridlock. But after decades of inaction, time is running out.

That’s why Wynne is trying to rally support from across the political spectrum as opposed to the partisan spectrum that is lining up against her, led by Tory Leader Tim Hudak and the NDP’s Andrea Horwath.

“Parties do their polling and they don’t see easy answers; they don’t see easy wins,” Wynne mused.

In fact, the latest Forum Research poll shows two-thirds of voters in the GTA oppose a 1 per cent regional sales tax. But if Wynne opted for a smaller 0.5 per cent tax (as Los Angeles did), would people really rise up?

Surprisingly, voters are evenly split on a $1 daily parking levy — which isn’t bad news for Wynne. Road tolls for premium express lanes were opposed by 51 per cent but backed by a surprising 43 per cent (with 6 per cent undecided).

One way of looking at these numbers is to ask whether the glass is half empty or half full. But a better way of digesting the data is to consider the trendlines, because a poll is only a snapshot in time. And the smartest way of analyzing future trends is to pose the questions more persuasively.

Rather than merely asking people if they want to pay more, Wynne should ask commuters if they want to put up with worsening traffic jams. Only then should she raise the question of whether they would go along with special transportation taxes.

It requires, as she explained, a “major culture shift.”

True, hers will not be a lone voice. The board of trade has launched an advertising campaign. So too has CivicAction, an umbrella group of progressive advocacy groups. Metrolinx is pushing its own ad campaign. In a timeline that is hardly coincidental, all three of these organizations are backstopping Wynne — the board on Monday, CivicAction next week, Metrolinx next month.

But at the end of the day, Wynne will wear it. To win the day, Wynne must find her voice — not just at Bay St. business lunches, or NGO pep rallies, but on the streets of the GTA.

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